The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The performance and capabilities of computing devices have increased dramatically since their introduction. However, computing devices of all types remain susceptible to device failures, whether from malfunctioning device hardware or from external conditions such as a loss of electrical power. For businesses and users that rely on computing devices, such failures can result in highly undesirable downtime and possible data loss.
For some computing environments, a cluster architecture may be configured to mitigate some of the problems posed by device failures. In general, a clustered computing environment consists of multiple computing devices that may be connected by a network and that operate in a coordinated fashion to provide access to data and/or one or more computing services.